The Shadow Government
President George W. Bush acknowledged on March 1, 2002 that the administration had taken comprehensive measures to guarantee "the continuity of government," or COG as it has internally been labeled after it was revealed that about 100 top officials, spanning every executive branch department, have been sent to live and work in two fortified locations on the East Coast. This system, in which high-ranking administrators are rotating in and out of the two sites, represents the first time a president has activated the contingency plan, which was devised during the Cold War of the 1950s so that federal government activities could continue if Washington were struck by a catastrophic attack. Bush ordered the precautions in the hours after the September 11 strikes, and has left them in place because of continuing U.S. intelligence suggesting a possible threat. Only the executive branch is represented in the full-time shadow administration. The other branches of constitutional government, Congress (House and Senate) and the judiciary, have separate continuity plans but do not maintain a 24-hour presence in fortified facilities. The two sites of the shadow government make use of local geological features to render them highly secure.
Precautions that have placed Vice President Dick Cheney at a secure and undisclosed location since the terrorist strikes on New York and the Pentagon are part of the "shadow government" plan. But while Cheney has resumed a schedule that is "almost normal," as the senior official put it, the "shadow government" of "several dozen, roughly 100" senior government workers remains in place, using two secure locations in the eastern United States that were constructed for such a contingency. (WP) The Pentagon has a separate operation to ensure continuity of operations. Bush visited one of its secure "command and control" bunkers -- at an Air Force base in Nebraska -- as he took a careful route back to Washington from Florida on September 11 as the "continuity of government" protocols were first implemented. Cheney took the lead in Washington, working from a bunker deep beneath the White House complex. The military chain of command has long maintained redundant centers of communication and control, hardened against thermonuclear blast and operating around the clock. The headquarters of U.S. Space Command, for example, is burrowed into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., and the U.S. Strategic Command staffs a comparable facility under Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Civilian departments have had parallel continuity-of-government plans since the dawn of the nuclear age. But they never operated routinely, seldom exercised, and were permitted to atrophy with the end of the Cold War. Sept. 11 marked the first time, according to Bush administration officials, that the government activated such a plan. Bush has placed Chief of Staff Andrew Card and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge in charge of the operation and the parallel effort to improve the communications and other infrastructure issues, a senior official said. (WP) It is unclear whether any federal documents -- prepared either by the current White House or by Bush's predecessors dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower -- specify whether congressional leaders should be told if the plan is put into effect. At least one relatively general document, a 1988 executive order entitled "Assignment of Emergency Preparedness Responsibilities," stated the White House's National Security Council "shall arrange for Executive branch liaison with, and assistance to the Congress and the federal judiciary on national security-emergency preparedness matters." (WP) The executive order, signed by President Ronald Reagan, is a precursor to documents outlining the contingency plans in greater detail, which have not been made public. Regardless of whether Bush had an obligation to notify legislative leaders, the congressional leaders' ignorance of the plan he set in motion could raise the question of how this shadow administration wou
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1902
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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